Belly Flop Dialogue cut / feedback

Wen release?

How easy is a belly flop with an empty nose cone vs one with 100 tons of cargo in the nose cone? Where is the mass simulator block?

Currrently being referred to as "Adama Manuever" by SpaceX Announcer John Insprucker. Things happen so fast. But this is really a bad ass name.

Tim, this is well scripted and delivered. I enjoyed the content massively and found your cadence and method for breaking down and piecing back together concepts very intuitive. Thank you for your hard work and dedication!

As always, You’re a rockstar!

Looking good Tim - you mentioned landing on Mars a couple of times, made we wonder if with the really thin atmosphere there, would they use the vacuum engines for landing or the (earth) sea-level engines? Do the vacuum engines have the gimballing range?? Cheers

Love the picture of SN9 and SN10 on pad in the background!

New Patreon supporter and my first preview. Thank you Tim, well done. Looking forward to the graphics being inserted

This makes me so highly aware of how much of a visual learner I am. Looking forward to you integrating in some visuals. Love that you are able to get in situ footage of starship to start out your starship talks. Going to look back on this in 10 years and say "This is what Boca Chica looked like back then".

KiT

This is really comprehensive and well written. Great job Tim and crew <3

Nice - Thanks Tim!

Rapid Relaunch Reliability and Confidence Test I think it would be a good idea to just hoist a successfully landed test vehicle back on test stand then quickly launch it on short hop again and again a half dozen times just to gain confidence of flip landing and better establish engine reliability. Engines can be swapped out from time to time for inspection during this ‘rapid launch reliability and confidence test’.

Gary Guttebo

Hey Tim great work follow you all the time. I want to propose a question about these two 10 km tests. Seems they have liftoff accelerate to 10 km then hover. They seem to have that down pretty bad even after these two flights The rotation to the flop seems like they can handle. And coming out of the horizontal position they seem to be able to control that also. It's the engine restart. And elon's quote about being dumb kind of hit home. So my proposal is this. With these fully integrated Starship test models with nose cone fins and a mirrored different other equipment they didn't have on on the hop tests. I propose that they do a hop test in this configuration. All three engines all burning in a hover. Possibly shutting down one one or even two engines and see what the control parameters turn out to be. I just think they're getting a little too far ahead and a little too aggressive. Remember the hopper tests in Texas. They did a lot of those.. having fun watching always will be a supporter Thanks your time Scott

Tim, love your work and appreciate your dedication to keeping us all inspired! I am really excited for this video, will be must-watch for my kids and maybe even their classmates. One suggestion, you do a great job explaining the "why" when it comes to the belly flop but maybe back up a bit and start with the first principle of "must land on mars, therefore propulsive landing is a requirement" -- everything sort of flows from there. I suspect many people watching your video will be wondering "why not parachutes" or "why not space shuttle landing". Just a thought, whatever you decide I am sure the video will be awesome.

Stephen Ritter

Welll... Must admit. SN8 was sooo close. SN9.... not so good. Problems with trying to land with one engine working both times. Hot gas thrusters will certainly enlarge the ‘success’ envelope when engine gimble movements don’t have to work so hard. Big job for engineers to create hardware and software that can detect and safely mitigate one or more possible failure modes happening at any instant. Cheering on SN10! Stay Well....

Gary Guttebo

DINOMIKE - My old physics teacher would be proud of you. I enjoyed the explanations-will leave the minor editorial corrections to the Pros among us. SpaceX is rapidly giving me another Passion to match digging up dinosaurs. I watch whenever am not in the dino-quarry. Thanks Tim & Co.

As a non-technical Patreon I can tell you that your explanation was very understandable to me. I do understand that when you say “meters per second squared” that you mean “meters per second per second”. The key point to make clear to the viewers irrespective of units is that the vehicle keeps going faster and faster and the point at which you make the flip gives more time for that to happen requiring more work from the engines to cancel out. The key is to reach zero velocity at as close to 0 altitude as possible with the least amount of fuel to confirm my understanding.

At 22:30, when describing the heights, you accidentally said 2000 m/s and 500 m/s instead of meters. Probably just a rough cut thing, but wanted to make sure you saw it before the final cut. Video is great!

You're great!

You mention that SpaceX and NASA are different, and NASA does not compete with SpaceX. I could help explain how NASA is important to every American space company. I could discuss with the 'Everyday Astronaut' the Government Approved Metals for space handbook that NASA wrote. My company has been working with the government agency 'NASA' since 1990s. I was just out of college running the forges to produce the test specimens and now I am an owner the company.

This is going to be a great video Tim!

There's a Google spreadsheet for those comments

Tibo

Loving your work Tim and your fans will love this one too. May I make a small comment? You keep mentioning acceleration as "...metres per second, squared". This is incorrect as I was told many times at university. Acceleration is measured in "..metres per second, per second". Gravity will pull you to 9.81 m/s in the first second, then that amount again in the next second. It pulls you at 9.81 m/s in every second. This is written as a small 2 in physics, which most people know as squared in maths. Hence the mistake. So as you can see, saying 9.81 metres per second squared, actually doesn't mean anything. Thank you for all the enthusiasm, joy and knowledge you bring. Upwards!! 🚀👍

Bobbie

Yeah can’t wait for the final version, this made my head spin haha

The video is really enjoyable and the content is so interesting. I’m definitely going to need the graphics and numbers on screen and quite a few views to understand it but I do have the same question as the others about the thin atmosphere on Mars and the bellyflop’s ability to scrub enough velocity to slow it from what I presume is pretty bloody fast between the planets. Does it just mean that it will take more than three Raptors at the landing burn to execute there? Looking forward to seeing the final version. In the meantime you are looking a bit peaky...I sound like an Irish mammy (I am an Irish mammy) but the last month of Starship Stalking must be tiring you out....take a break!

Róisín Ní Mhuircheartaigh

19:10 "The longer they are in the belly flop orientation, the slower their terminal velocity". I think that should be just 'velocity', not 'terminal velocity'. Terminal velocity is based something's weight and the drag in its current configuration, regardless of how fast it's going at the particular time. Also, at 18:57 we can hear you grumble and say "ok" before starting the take. :)

(I'm not a physicist, but...) Wouldn't the "gravity drag" be much different considering the rocket is at terminal velocity and the air drag is considerable? If the rocket were stationary or outside an atmosphere, thrust = weight would result in no acceleration, but in the case of 100m/s terminal velocity, effectively canceling out the weight with thrust would change the rocket's terminal velocity and the air drag would slow the rocket. Another way of thinking about it: If the unpowered rocket is at terminal velocity, there's already a force balancing the weight preventing further acceleration, and that's without any fuel consumption. Any additional thrust would decelerate it. Obviously we care about how quickly the rocket slows, and as it slows it converges on the simple no-air-drag model, but I'm afraid the numeric examples may be particularly incorrect during the maneuver.

Great job!

Thank you so much Timm!!! That was extremely educational and fun video!! Looking forward to seeing it again with all the effects!

Great work! Only substantive comment is inre the difference between energy, work (change in energy) and power (rate of work) at 17:11 and 17:45

I was waiting for B-rolls and graphics for a good 9 min until I realized we were reviewing the dialog only 😅 The part about the feather and hammer "at least here in Earth in Earth's atmosphere" while true, it makes it feel like it could be different on another planet even with atmosphere. But wouldn't Starship do the belly flop in Mars even with 1% our atmosphere? Something like "at least here on earth thanks to the atmosphere".

Tibo

The graphics on this one will make all the difference in the world! Even just having numbers on screen will help a ton!

Everyday Astronaut

The quality of your content increases exponentially - well done Tim & Team. I found nothing major in the dialogue (again, better every time). If anything, I'd probably cut either 'difference/change' or 'delta' where used together - still nothing major. Really looking forward to the complete video and to sharing it with the people I recently introduced to this amazing subject 💪

Great and informative video Tim. It looks and sounds good. Thanks

Can’t find anything after first run, but my ‘visual’ brain also (seriously) lags without graphs/charts or simple visuals. The dialog is understood, but not having the visualization to help the brain memorize it, is making it hard(er). Thanks for all the coverage, and the decoration of the ‘studio’ is all perfect 😉

Nice made. Very educational and well told.

Good stuff. I'm sure it will help many newcomers understand what SpaceX is up to.

Great job:). Look forward to watching complete video 😀